Writer, translator, critic: How Shanta Gokhale’s works have shaped cultural conversations

I discovered Shanta Gokhale the way most people discover writers who change them – by accident, in a second-hand bookstore on Grant Road, on a Tuesday afternoon when I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. The spine was cracked, the pages had that particular yellow that comes from sitting in Mumbai humidity for years. Rita Welinkar. I bought it for Rs 20 and read it standing at the bus stop, then sitting on the bus, then walking home from the bus stop because I couldn’t stop reading. That was 15 years ago, and I still have that copy, more broken now, with notes in the margins in three different colours of ink from three different readings.

I’ve returned to Gokhale’s work dozens of times since – not for comfort, but for clarity. For the reminder that writing can be both scalpel and mirror, that you can dissect a life without draining it of blood, that you can love a city and still document its failures. On December 3, 2025, at the 19th Crossword Book Awards held at The LaLit Mumbai, Shanta Gokhale received the Lifetime Achievement Award, becoming the fifth recipient after Ruskin Bond, Sudha Murty, Shashi Tharoor, and Amitav Ghosh. Her longtime friend, celebrated journalist Bachi Karkaria, presented the award. The recognition was overdue, but then again, Gokhale has never been one to wait for permission or applause. She’s been doing the work – relentlessly, quietly, brilliantly – for over six decades.

Theatre criticism

Before I read Gokhale’s theatre criticism, I thought reviewing was about liking or not liking something. I was young and stupid and convinced that having opinions made me interesting. Then I read her columns – archived, scanned, passed around by theatre nerds like samizdat – and realised I’d been confusing opinion with analysis. Gokhale doesn’t just tell you whether a play worked. She tells you why it worked or didn’t, contextualising it within the history of Marathi drama, within the politics of the moment, within the architecture of storytelling itself. She can eviscerate a performance and still honour the attempt. She can praise a show while pointing out exactly where it could have been braver. What strikes me most about her criticism is the absence of cruelty. She holds artists to high standards, yes, but she writes like someone who understands that making art is hard, that failure is part of the process, that theatre especially – live, ephemeral, collaborative – deserves criticism that’s as rigorous as it is generous.

In one of her interviews, she explained her approach to documentation with characteristic clarity: “Criticism gives you a single viewpoint. Documentation brings in multiple viewpoints. This helps future generations to see an issue from all sides and make up their own mind about what is valuable for them and what is not.” This philosophy runs through all her work – the refusal to be the sole arbiter, the commitment to preserving multiple voices, the understanding that her role is to illuminate rather than dictate.

Her landmark book Playwright at the Centre: Marathi Drama from 1843 to the Present sits on my desk, not on my shelf, because I’m always reaching for it. It’s not just scholarship – it’s an act of cultural archaeology and love. She excavated 157 years of theatrical tradition, rescuing playwrights who would have otherwise been footnotes or forgotten entirely. When she wrote it, she discovered something devastating: “All I found were books filled with anecdotes. There was neither a rigorous critical viewpoint nor a fix on dates and hard facts.” So she created what didn’t exist – a rigorous, factual, comprehensive history that treats regional theatre not as a curiosity but as central to understanding Indian performance. Reading it, you realise how much regional literature gets erased in the grand narrative of “Indian Literature” – and how people like Gokhale refuse to let that happen. I think about this often, about what gets remembered and what gets lost, about who decides what matters. Gokhale decided that Marathi theatre mattered, that these voices mattered, and she spent years making sure no one could forget them.

What we want and what we tell

Rita Welinkar is not a comfortable novel. Rita is not a comfortable protagonist. She’s ambitious, contradictory, sometimes selfish, always complicated. She wants things – career, independence, recognition – but she also wants security, respectability, love. She makes choices that hurt people, including herself. She’s trapped by the expectations of middle-class Maharashtrian society, but she’s also complicit in maintaining some of those structures. In other words, she’s a real person. I read Rita Welinkar first when I was 22 and thought I understood it. I read it again at 30 and realised I hadn’t understood anything. I read it last year and finally saw what Gokhale was doing – the way she refuses easy categorisation, the way her women aren’t symbols of tradition or rebellion but just people trying to navigate impossible situations with imperfect information and conflicting desires, which is, of course, what all of us are doing all the time.

The psychological realism in Gokhale’s fiction is surgical. She gets at the gap between what we tell ourselves and what we actually want, between who we think we are and who we become when no one’s watching. Her prose is deceptively simple – crystalline, precise – but underneath it there’s an understanding of human ambiguity that most writers spend careers trying to achieve. The resonance of Rita Welinkar was such that Gokhale’s daughter, actress Renuka Shahane, adapted it into a Marathi film in 2009, bringing Rita’s story to a new generation. The fact that a novel written decades earlier could still feel urgent, still feel true, tells you everything about Gokhale’s understanding of how little changes in the architecture of women’s lives, how the same battles get fought in different rooms. In her autobiography One Foot on the Ground, she quotes Virginia Woolf: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Then she adds, with characteristic honesty, “I had to struggle so hard to write my first novel.”

That autobiography, published in 2019, is itself a masterpiece of a different kind – the story of her life told entirely through her body. From her birth in 1939 (“She’s going to be a philosopher,” the doctor said when she emerged silent, before turning her upside down and slapping her bottom until “philosophy fled. A lusty bawl filled the air”), through tonsils and breasts and cancer and bunions, she traces eight decades not through achievements but through the physical experiences that shaped her. It’s funny, candid, utterly unsentimental. She writes about her body the way she writes about everything – with brutal honesty tempered by acceptance, never self-pitying, always clear-eyed. Reading it, you understand that this is someone who has lived fully, who has faced heartbreak and illness and loss without either denial or melodrama.

I came to her translation work late, which I regret. By the time I discovered that she’d translated Vijay Tendulkar, Mahesh Elkunchwar, Satish Alekar, GP Deshpande, and Premanand Gajvi into English, I’d already spent years reading Marathi plays in clunky, lifeless translations that made brilliant work feel like homework. Gokhale’s translations are different. They breathe. They capture not just dialogue but dialect, not just plot but texture. She doesn’t just translate words; she translates worlds. And she works in both directions – bringing English works like Jerry Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom and Gieve Patel’s Mister Behram into Marathi, enriching both literary traditions. In a nation fractured by language politics, she’s been a quiet unifier, proving that translation isn’t dilution but celebration, isn’t loss but multiplication.

Her friendship with theatre director Satyadev Dubey spanned 50 years and shaped much of her understanding of theatre. She attended his rehearsals, watched him direct plays by fresh writers like Girish Karnad, and absorbed his methods. He directed Avinash, the first play she wrote. But their friendship also included a decade-long falling-out when he lost his temper because Renuka Shahane gave up theatre for television acting. Yet they reconciled, and when she edited a book about him, she observed something telling: “He never spoke of the past nor did he live in it. But when Ashok Kulkarni interviewed him for the oral history, he couldn’t stop talking about the past.” That observation captures something essential about Gokhale herself – her interest in how people present themselves versus who they actually are, the gap between what we claim and what we reveal.

There’s a specific kind of nostalgia that comes from reading writers who love the same city you do. Gokhale’s Mumbai is my Mumbai – not the glossy metropolis of Bollywood or the slum-porn of poverty tourism, but the lived city, with its Irani cafés and vanishing mill lands, its resilient inhabitants and impossible rents, its particular cruelty and unexpected kindness. In an interview about her writing process, she explained how observation fed her work: “In the old days when I took buses, that was a huge kind of world by itself. You meet so many different kinds of people. And you overheard conversations. And luckily, in India, people don’t keep their voices down.” That attention to the cacophony of urban life, to the overlapping stories happening simultaneously, runs through all her work.

Her 2020 book Shivaji Park: Dadar 28 is a love letter to the neighbourhood where she grew up, written with the urgency of someone who knows that gentrification erases not just buildings but memory itself. Her family moved there in 1941 when her father joined a newspaper called Searchlight. She went to Bombay Scottish School in Mahim, left for England at 15 to study English literature at Bristol University, and returned at 21 to do her MA at the University of Mumbai. The neighbourhood has been her anchor through all of it – two marriages, two divorces, raising her children Renuka and Girish Shahane as a single parent, her years at The Times of India and Femina, her career as a teacher and public relations executive at Glaxo Laboratories, her endless writing and translating. I read Shivaji Park during lockdown, stuck in a flat in Andheri, unable to go anywhere, and felt like I was walking through Dadar with her, seeing the neighbourhood as it was and as it’s becoming, mourning and celebrating in the same breath. That’s what great writing about place does – it makes you homesick for somewhere you’ve never left.

Awards have come, steady and deserved, though always feeling slightly inadequate for the magnitude of contribution. Two National Awards for documentary film scripts (including one for Haathi Ka Anda, directed by her ex-husband Arun Khopkar). Two Maharashtra State Awards for her novels – the VS Khandekar Award for Rita Welinkar in 1992 and another for Tya Varshi (That Year) in 2009. The Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 2015 for her overall contribution and scholarship in the performing arts. Lifetime achievement awards from Thespo, the Ooty Literary Festival, and Tata Literature Live! in 2019. Earlier this year, in March 2025, the Women AutHer Award’s Lifetime Achievement Award from The Times of India. And now, the Crossword Book Awards recognition. Each award tells the same story: here is a writer who matters, whose work has shaped not just literature but the cultural conversation itself.

Being ‘connected’

What I return to, though, isn’t the awards or the accomplishments. It’s the work itself. It’s the way Gokhale writes criticism that educates without condescending, fiction that disturbs without sensationalising, translations that honour without erasing. It’s the way she’s spent six decades paying attention – to plays, to people, to language, to the city she loves. In an interview, she once quoted Peter Brook’s definition of theatre: “There’s a room, and one man walks across the room while another watches him. And that is theatre.” That minimalism, that insistence on the essential, characterises her approach to everything. Strip away the unnecessary. Focus on what matters. Tell the truth as you see it.

In an age of hot takes and quick reads and content optimised for engagement, there’s something almost revolutionary about a writer who moves slowly, thinks deeply, refuses shortcuts. Asked once why she connects so deeply with her material, she responded simply: “Because I’m connected, I write. What would I write about if I wasn’t connected? I mean, unless some writers are writing mythology, which I’m not. So if you want to write contemporary stuff, then you write because you’re connected. There are issues out there. There are things that you observe, and all of that makes the material of your work.”

Gokhale represents a kind of literary life that feels increasingly rare: one lived with integrity, without compromise, in service of something larger than personal brand or market success. Born in 1939, now in her mid-eighties, she continues to write, to observe, to document. She lives in Lalit Estate in Shivaji Park, the same neighbourhood she’s chronicled for decades, with her two helpers, Alka Dhulap and Sanjay Pashte. Her neighbour is Jerry Pinto, who edited The Engaged Observer: The Selected Writings of Shanta Gokhale in 2018 and who has been instrumental in bringing her work to wider audiences. She still walks the neighbourhood, still watches plays, still translates, still writes.

I keep her books close, not because they make me feel good but because they make me think harder. About what writing can do. About what criticism should be. About how to live in a city that’s constantly erasing its own past. About how to be honest about people – including yourself – without being cruel. About how to spend a life doing work that matters even when no one’s paying attention, trusting that eventually someone will, and even if they don’t, doing it anyway because it needs doing. In her typically unsentimental way, she once noted that she never thought she’d become a professional writer – it was simply that “one of my pieces got published in The Times of India. And, suddenly I thought – you know, there’s always a moment at which you realise – that what you write for yourself appears to be important to other people too. And that happens when someone wants to publish what you have written.”

On December 3, when Bachi Karkaria handed Gokhale that award, I imagine she accepted it with the same quiet grace she brings to everything – grateful but not overwhelmed, honoured but not done. Because there’s always another play to see, another book to translate, another story to tell. That’s what the writers who stay teach you: that the work is never done, that attention is a discipline, that caring deeply about craft and language and truth isn’t naive or old-fashioned but the only thing that matters.

Shanta Gokhale is one of 12 writers I return to when I need to remember why reading matters. Not the biggest name on the list. Not the most famous. But one of the ones that stayed, that changed how I see, that made me want to pay better attention to everything. The legacy isn’t in the awards or the word count or the number of books. It’s in the hundreds of people like me who found her work and found in it permission to take writing seriously, to love cities honestly, to believe that regional doesn’t mean minor and quiet doesn’t mean insignificant. It’s in the playwrights who’ll never be forgotten because she documented them, the translators who learned from her example, the critics who understand that rigour and generosity aren’t opposites.

The gratitude is immense. The work continues. The legacy is permanent.

The article first appeared on the author’s substack, The Twelve.